


Prodigal Sons

by Fiction_Over_Fact



Category: Naruto
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 09:22:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15482664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fiction_Over_Fact/pseuds/Fiction_Over_Fact
Summary: Sasuke is gone and Naruto is gone and Kakashi might as well be.In which Sakura is sad and alone but discovers she doesn’t have to be either.





	Prodigal Sons

**Author's Note:**

> ~~This is unbetaed AND the first thing I’ve finished in…at least 7 years? Ish. So ofc it’s a throwaway one off and not one of my 5yo WIPs. Also, if this looks familiar that’s cuz I posted it like a week ago, immediately lost all confidence, deleted it and shoved a few hundred more words into it. Whoops?~~
> 
> **1-8-19** : I grew pretty fond of this fic several months after having posted it so, while I kept most of my original anxiety ridden notes for transparency, it's not in any danger of deletion or stylistic revision or anything, don't worry!

A month and a half after Naruto leaves, Tsunade disbands Team 7.

Sakura hadn’t expected it but, thinking back on it later, she shouldn’t have been surprised.

What kind of genin team had two people? What village would waste Copy-nin Kakashi on his last little genin, when even her teammates didn’t stick around?

(That’s not really fair, not to Naruto, but she is _tired_.)

“It’s not permanent,” Tsunade tells her, with a mildly troubled expression and a piece of paper stuck to her cheek. Sakura hasn’t been apprenticed under her for long but anyone could tell it was from her drunken nap on her desk earlier.

She doesn't look up from the disbandment paper in her hands.

Her fingers crinkle the edges.

“But with the current state of your team,” Tsunade’s voice trails off for a moment. Sakura can’t decide why, doesn’t know if it’s because of empathy, apathy or something else.

Tsunade, more than anyone else she can think of, knows what she’s going through.

Sakura swears to herself that she will never, never ask her what it feels like. More than (almost) anything in the world _she doesn't want to know_. There are many ways she wouldn't mind being like her mentor.

The status of her team is not one.

Silence hangs heavy between them for a long moment, burdened by words neither of them are willing to say.

“-disbandment is required outside of medical leave or special circumstance.” Tsunade finishes.

Sakura wonders what could be a more special circumstance than theirs.

A sensei in the wind and his three genin: a traitor, better off as far from the village as possible and apprenticed to someone else.

She figures that Team 7’s ‘special’ isn’t the kind they have protocols for.

Tsunade turns back to her work after another long moment of silence in the office, apart from the hum of the AC and the muffled drone of other people in the tower. Sakura looks up from the notice to glance at Tsunade once her pen starts scratching away again. Her mentor is frowning very slightly.

It feels good to have someone worry about her, which Sakura knows is probably bad. She tucks the paper away into her bag, between the pages of one of the medical books she’s working through. Sakura pulls her injury scenario sheets out, the ones Shizune gives her because anatomy and control and technique are all well and good—

_four man squad, male mid 20s, head trauma, severe concussion; female late teens, unconscious, suspect unknown poison; female late 30s, bleeding heavily, right arm in need of amputation_

—but it was all worth shit if you didn’t know who you could save and who you were just making suffer.

“Sakura?” Tsunade asks, after a bit.

“Not permanent, yes sensei,” Sakura repeats, looking down at the papers in her grasp.

No matter what Tsunade says to her, where Kakashi-sensei is, what she tells her parents when she heads home, nothing about the mix of “Team 7” and “disbanded” feels temporary.

Sasuke is gone. Not dead or on a mission or injured. He left. And she wants him back—for her and for Naruto, for Kakashi-sensei, for Sasuke himself—but she knows it won’t be the same even when (or _if_ or _when_ or _if_ ) he’s back in Konoha.

Naruto is gone. Not dead or injured or a traitor. She sent him away, because Sasuke was gone and at the time that had mattered more than Naruto at her side, because Sakura has always been a stupid little girl with a crush, deep down inside.

And oh, how she _hates_ that.

Kakashi-sensei is gone now, too. Not dead or injured, not a traitor or miles and miles away because she told him to go. But he is gone on paper—no longer obligated to her or responsible for her or in charge of her—and gone from her life.

No more eating at cramped food stalls or getting head pats and eye smiles or waiting three hours for a training session that he never talks to her during, because her team mates are so bright they’re nearly blinding and it’s hard for a spark to stand out between stars.

“Not permanent,” Tsunade says again. Her voice is firm and so are her eyes, but both have a little give in them, if listened to and looked at closely enough.

The little pieces of gentleness that reside in the strongest woman in the world.

 

_Not permanent_ , Sakura thinks, hours later, looking up at the ceiling of her bedroom. It’s off-white, but with a bubblegum pink tinge rather than a beige one. She picked the color when she was five years old and had a new best friend.

It’s too soft.

A lot of her things are too soft.

Her pillow is too soft, her pajamas are too soft, the look in her parents’ eyes when they eat dinner with her is too soft.

A part of her, the little kernel of self-doubt and self-hatred and inadequacy forged by standing too close to impossible people, hisses that she deserves to feel this way—lost and alone, because everything in her life before Team 7 was so  _easy_.

Naruto and Sasuke were difficult though, and even now she knows just enough about Kakashi-sensei that it hurts to think of.

Was it any surprise that they made her hard too? They made her difficult and stubborn and unhappy with the way things were and then they left and now she’s out of place—a kunai in a cradle, a senbon in a silk dress, a ninja in a girl.

And they’re gone.

 

Sakura wakes up, gets dressed, eats breakfast and walks to the Hokage Tower, all with the intense feeling that something should feel more wrong than it does, now that she’s different.

Now that she’s not Team 7 anymore.

It was a big part of her for so long—being Team 7 decided the direction of her career and her lifestyle, her skill set and her friends, her fucking lifespan. And now she isn’t Team 7 anymore and nothing has changed.

Sakura gets to the tower and talks to Shizune who looks over her scenarios and gives her advice and scrolls and the task of waking Tsunade up from her first nap of the day, all of which are reasons Shizune is Sakura’s favorite and least favorite person.

Tsunade growls and grumbles and demands breakfast and more liquor, which Sakura faithfully ferries in to her, before they both settle down for a routine day of staring intensely at papers for long periods of time.

In the evenings, she works on her control and studies anatomy and runs through katas and feels the sun set over her head but can never bring herself to look up, for fear that she will remember tree climbing, for fear that she will remember what it was like to leave the training ground between sweaty boys, for fear that she will recognize the sun.

She keeps her head down, and she walks.

And so goes the next day, and the next day, and the next, and then it’s been two months since she wasn’t Team 7 anymore and Sakura still doesn’t know if she feels anything but her sore muscles.

Her parents worry, she knows. They worry like Tsunade worries.

She sees it in their faces when they say good morning, can feel it in her mom’s hugs before she leaves for work and the kisses her dad presses to her forehead.

They don’t worry for the right reasons.

They worry because she works long hours and she’s fourteen. They worry that she doesn’t have time for the handsome boy that lives next door to ask her on a date. They worry that she spends so much time with Tsunade and her training and the hospital that she might _never_ have time for a handsome boy anywhere to ask her on a date.

The love her and they worry but they don’t know who she is anymore.

They should worry that she is quieter, that she is lonelier, that she has only herself and a woman who spends all her time leading a village and at the bottom of a bottle, trying to forget how alone she is.

They should worry that she isn’t Team Seven anymore.

But they don’t. They’re civilians, they worry--but for the wrong reasons.

They are too soft. Everyday Sakura feels a little more like she’s sinking into them.

Like she’s drowning.

She thinks maybe that feeling, or something like it, is what made Sasuke choose to leave.

She thinks maybe, with trauma and time, she could understand his choice. Why he did this to himself, to Naruto, to Kakashi-sensei. To her.

She decides she doesn’t want to.

 

Sakura moves out slowly, then all at once.

She finds an apartment she can afford on a budget of blood and sweat from her hospital work and her mission pay. She acquires a couch. An end table. A bookshelf.

She sees Ino one day, walking back from the hospital.

Ino doesn’t wave or scream or shout. She just watches, eyes solemn and still and painfully, painfully blue.

Sakura isn’t Team Seven anymore, and Ino knows that means something.

She follows her home, not to her parents’ house but to her apartment, with its tiny rooms and its couch and its end table and its bookshelf.

Ino stops in the doorway and looks around. Once she’s had her fill she looks back to Sakura. For a long moment, she stares. Sakura looks back. A spring is loose in the couch. It stabs her in the back when she sits on it.

Nothing in her new apartment is too soft.

Satisfied, Ino nods. She leaves.

The next day she drops off a coffeemaker and a set of mugs.

The day after that Sakura picks up her things: the beaten up little TV in her room, the blanket her grandma made her when she was a baby, her basket of nail polish.

Pictures.

She talks to her parents that night at dinner.

Talks to them about who she is and what she does and what she will, one day soon, do. She walks away that night, the air humming around her with bugs and the sound of street lights and the warm, buzzing energy that lingers in warm air after dark.

She talked and she hoped that they had listened.

Because Sakura wasn’t Team Seven anymore, and they needed to understand that that meant something.

For them. For her.

 

The next day after work, Ino drags her out of her apartment, nail polish basket in hand. They sit in the shade of a tree on a hill, doing each other’s nails while Shikamaru and Choji cloud watch and eventually fall asleep.

Then, they paint the boys’ nails.

The next day she walks into her assigned room at the clinic for her last patient of the day and sees Kiba.

He opens his mouth, eyes bright. She hasn't seen him since he almost died trying to hold her world together. She winces, bracing herself and, all at once, he freezes. He waves instead, wiggling his fingers at her and she scolds him because that’s not how you treat your broken hand!

And when his hand is fixed and she leaves the hospital to head for the training ground she isn’t surprised to see him leaned against the wall outside. Isn’t surprised when he follows her and spars with her.

They finish earlier than she usually does, because Akamaru is gearing up to start a growth spurt and needs all the sleep he can get.

As they walk away from the grounds Kiba points out a cloud that looks exactly like a dog and Sakura looks up and the sun is just the sun and it is beautiful and barely hurts.

(The cloud really looks more like a cat to her, but she doesn’t mention that.)

 

She spends the following four days sleeping at the hospital, running her shifts and borrowing empty resident cots.

There was a fire in one of the poorer civilian districts on the outskirts of the village. Some jounin, unhappy that his civilian girlfriend dared to break up with him, had set her apartment complex on fire.

The place was old and densely populated. By the time anyone was able to respond the whole thing was a bright, crackling blaze, along with many of the people within it.

Tsunade works constantly with the medic-nin on staff, Shizune ever at her side. Sakura lingers behind, close enough to observe and assist if asked, far enough to be out of the way.

Learning distance, Tsunade had called it the first time she had Sakura do rounds with her, hands warm and firm on her shoulders as she’d pushed her back several steps.

The day she finally leaves the hospital for home she sees orange every time she closes her eyes.

It hurts, though for a different reason than it used to.

Halfway home, a cold nose bumps into the back of her calf when she’s down the street from Ichiraku. She turns to look, not quite surprised to see Akamaru standing there.

She’s a bit more surprised to see Kiba flanked by Hinata and Shino. The first two are out of their normal mission gear. Shino is dressed the same as always but something about him seems relaxed, content.

At ease.

Kiba’s tank top has a pawprint on it and Hinata is holding a picnic basket.

It hurts a little, for a reason Sakura can’t quite understand. Something that feels like potential that never was or could have been, like an opportunity that was never taken.

But it’s an old hurt now, like the twinge of a scar or the ache of tired muscle.

Painful, but almost pleasant.

She isn’t sure precisely _how_ she ends up spending the rest of the day with them, but it’s more fun than she’s had in quite a while.

By the time she makes it home that night she’s asleep before her eyes finish closing.

Orange can be a good memory again.

 

One day, two months after she had fully moved into her apartment, there is a knock on her door.

Sakura glances at a mirror, at the pictures taped to it—she and Ino with their arms over each other’s shoulders, her arm wrestling Rock Lee while he cries, the Rookie Nine all crammed into one booth at Yakiniku Q (packed so tightly one almost didn’t notice the holes)—and down to her sweat pants and paint stained shirt.

She washed her hair two days ago, before she got sucked into running a double shift because of a mean stomach bug.

She opens the door anyway.

“Hey Sakura-chan.”

She blinks and shuts the door.

Her heartbeat thuds loud in her chest. She’s put a lot of effort into herself over the past few months. Who she was and who she is and who she wants to become.

Sakura isn’t Team Seven anymore and, as much as it had hurt and she would never have wanted it to happen, would never have _chosen_ this for them, not the way Sasuke had—

She thinks it might have been good for her, been something she needed (though _not_ the way it had happened). Because now she stands on her own feet, the way she had once promised.

Now, she thinks, she needs something else.

So she opens the door and reaches out, drags the man inside and over to the table that Ino made Shikamaru help them put together one day, while thunder had rattled her roof.

She takes the potted plant he holds out to her, buries her face underneath his chin and clutches onto him for longer than she probably should. And it is such a _relief_ , such a _freedom_ that she doesn’t care about things like that anymore, because they're so insignificant, so small.

Sakura leans back and looks up at him and maybe he isn’t eye smiling but the look she sees there is warm and soft in a way that hurts and that is more than enough. His hand lands, gently, on her head.

She grins and it feels like something is tearing her face apart, it feels like flowers blooming, like a warm bed on a cold night and the sunrise peaking up over the horizon. It feels like coming home to a place that is not the same, could never be the same, but is damn close enough. Past to present and on to future sprawled before, healthy and hearty.

_Whole_.

“Hi Kakashi-sensei.”

**Author's Note:**

> ~~This is so ~dramatic~. I had Sakura feels and wondered what her relationship with Kakashi would be like after the boys left and (somehow) ended up writing about her finding herself instead of that.~~
> 
> ~~Hopefully this isn't too vague or confusing or fanfiction.net-y? I'm not sure I care for it even after reworking it in my typical "hide shame, cleanse tag" posting panic, BUT I figure someone out there might like it, and it’ll at least be good to look back on in the future?~~
> 
>  
> 
> Edit, 1-8-19: The above are my old, worried notes and, while I do still often lack confidence in my writing, I've grown fond of this fic. I crossed them out because while they _were_ true at the time of posting they aren't anymore. Still, it felt kind of wrong to remove them altogether as I've gotten some lovely comments from people about them, so I'm leaving them on here.


End file.
